Faith and Poetry

Poetry arises where language meets mystery. With that beginning, my poet-friend Michael Beadle and I presented two evenings at our Methodist church on “Faith and Poetry.” In doing so, we were swimming in a rising river of interest in this connection. It seems to me that there is an increasing openness in general to poetry with religious and spiritual themes in many places. For instance, Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry magazine, has taken up a post in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School. This past weekend Michael and I enjoyed hearing the Kentucky poet Maurice Manning and participating in a short workshop with him. For one example of his imaginative exploration of spiritual themes, we can recommend his earlier book Bucolics (2007). All of this may be part of the reconstituting of the arts in a post-secularist age.

To explore this connection we first identified the way poetic utterance and writing arises out of our own struggles with life’s mysteries of beauty, love, death, evil, and purpose. We began with poetry of praise and exultation. I drew from pieces in Turnings as well as other, unpublished poems. Michael was drawing from his recent publication, Invitation (2013) and other writings. Both of us connect natural beauty with the impulse to praise, whether in walking into a forest in morning’s crisp light, or seeing the iridescent greens of spring’s cathedral.

We then turned to contemplation and meditation through poetry. By heightening our perception of particulars, whether they be wooden spoons, seabirds, blossoms or bull elks, they help us focus our life energy like a laser light, illuminating new dimensions of awareness.

Both of us felt that humor, which arises out of startling juxtapositions and paradoxes, can split open our experience in a revealing way. One might say that appreciative laughter means that we are closer to the awesome mystery that calls into question the pretensions, illusions, defenses and lies by which we navigate the shoals of a dangerous world. Michael’s “In God we rust” arose from seeing a sign that had lost its “T.” My own poem, “The Learning Curve,” reported on the humbling experience of learning how to tie my shoes properly.

If poems can do anything, it is to sensitize us to a suffering world, indeed, to our own disguised suffering as well. One of Michael’s poems, “Spearfinger,” adapted an old Cherokee story to confront us with the duality in all our lives. I shared with them the poem “Abide with Him,” which just appeared in an earlier posting here.

Finally, returning to our lead, we tried to show how poetry breaks our language open so it can point to the mystery that is beyond words. Better yet, perhaps the wider mystery that engulfs us is an intensification of language, in which it breaks open, melts, and crystallizes into different forms.

The second evening was given over to the work of poetry in the church. We began with ways a poem can recast or reframe a biblical story to confront us with dimensions we had missed within the conventional familiarity of narratives about King David, Mary, and Jesus. We then turned to ways poetry informs religious education, whether as an aid to memory or by introducing us to questions that take us to a new level of understanding. Rhymes, cadences, and of course the songs they shape, enable us to remember things long after our discursive memory is lamed by age or trauma.

We concluded with some poems that might recast our understanding of corporate worship, especially in the Protestant churches, where the prose of morals, creeds, and dogma often do more to shackle our spirits than release and revive them. For us, worship is deeply connected to music, which is perhaps the most important frame of utterance for poetry. In a time when popular music has lost its way in a welter of noise, poets might help us reclaim song as a vehicle of words, both working together to open up our lives in new and startling ways.

We’re going to do some more of this. We’re working on poems as part of a medley of songs and anthems leading us into the mystery of Advent, working against the grain of our culture. If you’d like to say what’s going on with poetry and faith in your locale, please add it to the comments box by clicking on “Leave a comment” below.

SAWDUST AND SOUL: A Conversation on Woodworking and Spirituality

Sawdust and Soul arose from many conversations and joint woodworking projects I have had over the years with John de Gruchy—friend, theologian, and woodworker who lives in South Africa’s Western Cape but who has also spent extensive time in the US. We’ve talked a lot about our wood projects and how this traditional practice of turning trees into useful and artistic pieces shapes as well as expresses our deepest values and approaches to life as well as its transcendent source. These are conversations about woodworking and spirituality. We’ve included a bunch of pictures of our work as well as some line drawings and poetry by John’s wife Isobel. And yes, our children get in some words along with the woodworkers who have been part of our community of inspiration and support. Our topics range from the shaping of a sense of balance in our lives to dealing with loss, memory, and our wonder as creatures in the midst of an amazing abundance of life and artful design. Whether you’re a tree-hugger, an all-thumbs reader, or an honest-to-goodness woodworker, we invite you into the conversation. CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO CLIP!

For an EXCERPT from the book, by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, CLICK HERE.

William J. Everett

In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings. For more about my woodworking, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. READ MORE...

TURNINGS: Poems of Transformation

Like works in wood upon a lathe, these poems are word-turnings that reveal the inner grain of our human experience. They are bowls to catch our turnings of memory, conversion, falling in love, and passing through our seasons and the wrenching turns that mark our lives. Above all these turnings are a shout of praise, a murmur of wonder, a turning away from life as usual, a merciful re-turning to the songs, images and stories that move our lives.You can get TURNINGS at:

Red Clay Blood River

Red Clay, Blood River is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838.

OTHER WRITINGS – FREE

I am editing and recasting some of my previous writings into digital format to make them available free to interested persons and study groups. To see a list of these books and articles as well as to save them to your own computer, CLICK HERE.